SEO: Searching For Success

There are 18-20 individual factors which govern whether your website will attain top positions on the major search engines. Not one really overrides the other, but it is reasonable to suggest that areas such as website validation, page ranking, website accessibility and overall website build will contribute greatly to your success.

Before you sign with a Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) company there are several questions you need to consider how to avoid becoming one of the many businesses/organisations which have been burnt by "low end, low cost" SEO firms in the area, which simply do not deliver results.

1. Have they analysed your website?

A trained and experienced SEO company/technician will need to analyse your website, its code and its integral workings to ensure that all the pages can be indexed and highly ranked by the search engines. The company should provide exact details about the work that they will be carrying out.

2. Have they analysed the link strategies of your high ranking competition?

A quality SEO company will look at your competitors and identify the quality, number, and source of their inbound links. From this they can see how many links and of what quality you need to rank above these competitors.

3. Can you really see a return on your investment?

Think about it, Companies that appear in the Top 10 of the major search engines are generating high numbers of targeted traffic to their website, and they're not going to give that position up easily. The truth is you need to invest time, effort and expertise to really reap the rewards of high rankings. An investment of a couple of hundred pounds plus £30 per month is not going to get you competing with those websites generating thousands of unique visitors a day through search engines. * There is no point appearing number 1 on dozens of search engines for keywords that no one is searching for.

4. Have you been promised a number one placing?

Many companies are offering SEO services and the hook which is used is that they will guarantee that you will be number one on the search engines (on first contact with you). This simply is not possible. Only once the site is analysed can any kind of estimate be made, and even then the engines requirements change every few months, so how can they know?

5. Think outside Google.

Over the past few years it is true to say that Google have done a fantastic marketing exercise with their brand. After all, you do not say "I am going to Yahoo! it" do you? However, whilst Google is still the major search engine in the World, do not disregard the other major players - especially Yahoo! There are estimated to be 30 million internet users currently, in the UK. BT is still the biggest provider of internet services. Every BT Router that goes to a new client is packaged with the Yahoo! Search engine - not Google. Therefore, a lot of people's first experiences with a search engine are with Yahoo! It is proven that Yahoo! Have a much better algorithm for search engines than Google, so therefore your site may go higher, quicker on this engine. Disregard other engines at your peril.

And finally...

There is no quick, cheap and easy solution to gaining high rankings on the major search engines. For highly sought after, competitive search terms. But once there, you will find a return on your investment many times over. The main bulk of the cost in any good SEO project is the time it takes to analyse data on a monthly basis and then transform your website (code and design) to meet the requirements of the specific engine.

*Make sure you have the right SEO company working for you, if they can answer the above questions confidently and correctly then chances are that they will deliver what they promise.